Conclusion: WHITHER CAUSAL REALISM?

Summary

Does the analysis of causation laid out in the last eight chapters have any relevance to wider philosophical issues? One area in which the word ‘cause’ makes a regular appearance is in the contemporary debate about realism. Realism, crudely put, is the view that the character of the world is independent of the character of the human mind. Philosophers have understood various things by ‘realism’ and have sought to argue for it in many different ways, but one particular strategy has achieved something of a vogue. The idea behind it is that one should use notions like ‘cause’ and ‘law’ along with other ‘naturalistically acceptable’ notions to construct an account of problematic mental and linguistic phenomena. So, rather than starting one's theorising, as in former times, with facts about our experience of the world, or features of our language, the causal realist analyses both mental notions, such as ‘experience’ and ‘belief’, and linguistic notions, such as ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’, in ‘naturalistic’ terms. By means of this reduction, the causal realist exhibits the natural constitution of mind and language, how they are composed of nothing more than the causal and nomological relations between non-psychological and non-linguistic entities. He will thus undermine the anti-realist opinion that the direction of explanation goes the other way – mental or linguistic phenomena can hardly explain nature's most general features if they themselves are to be accounted for in ‘naturalistic’ terms.

Philosophers involved in the realist project have produced causal theories of truth, reference, representation, property, knowledge, belief and the direction of time – this in addition to the causal treatment which I myself handed out to perception, memory, action.